“Which natural gift would you most like to possess? The ability to master other languages (which would have hugely enhanced the scope of these answers).How would you like to die? Fully conscious, and either fighting or reciting (or fooling around).What do you most dislike about your appearance? The way in which it makes former admirers search for neutral words.”

“Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had ‘given’ their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a ‘divine’ emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome.The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you risk your life?”

“Busy with the ugliness of the expensive success We forget the easiness of free beautyLying sad right around the corner, Only an instant removed, Unnoticed and squandered.”

“You can’t be a rebel without the scars that come with it. Truth is, some days scars are just as ugly as they are beautiful.”

“It’s funny how the ugly duckling always has so many beautiful things to teach us.”

“Beauty is in everything.Ugliness is just in us.”

“Isn’t that the way God works? She’d thought. He takes the things in our lives that are ugly, disgusting, and downright wicked, and transforms them into something magnificent.”

“What’s the whole point of being pretty on the outside when you’re so ugly on the inside?”